Why do Spitfires turn better than Hurricanes?!

[reflected]

I had some fights online Hurri vs Spit. Spits can outturn Hurricanes without dropping a sweat, in a matter of seconds. Co E I mean. How come? Hurricanes should be a lot better turners, yet, it's like flying a bomber against Spitfires...This is absolutely crazy.

[Sven]

Which one has the correct turning time and which one doesnt? or are they both unrealistic?

[*Buzzsaw*]

Salute

Hurricane historically had a tighter turning circle than the Spitfire. However, the Spit retained energy much better, so that it could sustain a turn for a longer period. However, both should be able to easily outturn the 109 or 110, even the German reports noted that.

[ZaltysZ]

Originally Posted by *Buzzsaw*

Hurricane historically had a tighter turning circle than the Spitfire.

And turn time?

[reflected]

Interesting question - which one seems off? 109 vs Hurricane seems to match historical reports whichever I fly, however, Spitfire vs anything else...

Don't get me wrong, it's my favorite plane, but I do like flying other machines too and something seems to be wrong here.

Somebody would need to do some proper tests because 1c won't do anything based on what I feel

[Kwiatek]

What i think Spitfire and Hurricane had quite similar sustained turn rate.

Spitfire had thiner wings ( lower lift cofficent) and was lower draggy plane with the same engine as Hurricane which had thicker ( higher lift cofficient) but with higher drag. Both had similar wingloading - so what i think and what i read both are very close.

[ZaltysZ]

I think Spitfire and Hurricane have pretty similar turn time, but Hurricane has its best time at lower speed (so, Hurricane has smaller turn radius, despite almost the same turn time as Spitfire).

[Viper2000]

It's not really very useful to say that aircraft x out turns aircraft y unless you specify the conditions more precisely.

For example, in IL2 I could quite easily out turn Spitfires with my Fw190; but only in certain (relatively small) parts of the envelope.

In the case of the Spitfire I and Hurricane I, they should have identical engines, and I think they should have identical props (though this isn't immediately obvious since their top speeds are sufficiently different that it might have been worth designing different props, especially in the early fixed pitch or 2 pitch days).

This means that altitude shouldn't be a major factor, because the engine power should be identical (apart from ram) at all altitudes. Note however that the cooling drag is obviously different, so if you're minded to lump this into the "engine" section of the drag & mass accountancy then YMMV (IMO this sort of distinction is academic until such time as we know how 1c have actually built the models, though I suspect that cooling drag will be part of the airframe model rather than the engine model).

I would expect the Spitfire to outperform the Hurricane in a constant energy turn at high speeds, simply because the Spitfire is faster.

I would expect the Hurricane to achieve a higher maximum turn rate and a tighter minimum turn radius than the Spitfire because its wing loading is lower.

I would also point out that both measures are academic unless you're crazy enough to stay in a turn fight for several complete circles, since otherwise differences in roll rate (and thus turn entry time) will be important; the Spitfire is likely to win here because its span is shorter and therefore it may be expected to have less roll damping, all else being equal (which I know it isn't before somebody starts).

Equally, very few real fights are going to take place at constant "total" specific energy (quote marks used because of course this fighter pilot's definition of total energy is only kinetic + gravitational potential). I would expect the Spitfire to have superior instantaneous turn performance because of its lower stick force per g and higher roll rate; so basically if you're going fast enough to have spare energy for an instantaneous turn, the Spitfire is likely to be able to dump energy into angles rather faster than the Hurricane.

IME, once one aeroplane in a fight starts to develop any kind of advantage, there is a tendency for the losing pilot to pull too hard in an attempt to catch up, which tends to actually make his position worse (because he's then fighting the other pilot's fight instead of his own).

Lots of people around here at the moment seem to pull too hard and get themselves deep on the wrong side of the excess power curve and then complain about the poor aircraft performance which results.

Finally, I would observe that the vast majority of pilots who lived to tell war stories spent very little time at the edges of the flight envelope, especially with regard to sustained turns. For this reason, the majority of accounts stating "Aircraft x clearly out turns aircraft y, because I did this numerous times in combat" are best taken with a pinch of salt.

Statistically, the sample is extremely biased, because dead men tell no tales.

Consider this scenario:

• I want to find out whether or not it is safe to fly a kite in a thunderstorm.
• I briefly review the literature, and find that Benjamin Franklin did this successfully and wrote about it.

Is it therefore safe to fly a kite in a thunderstorm? Or was Benjamin Franklin simply a fairly lucky man? The Wikipedia page strongly suggests the latter, but it cites no sources in regard to its claim that:

The experiment also garnered attention and many attempted to recreate it. Some of the experimenters are known to have died during recreating the experiment.

I'm not suggesting that there are no references to be found on this subject - I'm just saying that one good "war story" told from the perspective of a "winner" is likely to assume more importance within the general literature than a secondary account of the experiences of those who gambled with their lives and lost.

So, you can find accounts saying that for example Spitfires would easily out turn 109s and you can equally find accounts saying that 109s could easily out turn Spitfires. What these accounts tell you is that the people who won fights tended to write more books about it than the people who lost them.

Genuinely satisfactory comparisons are extremely hard to come by. Genuine A/B comparisons under controlled conditions relied upon the use of captured aeroplanes which were inevitably less than representative of the average service machine (due to such factors as battle damage, lack of proper maintenance, incorrect fuel and lubricants, lack of proper batteries, lack of pilot experience, deliberate over-boosting to investigate development potential, questionable loadouts due to both lack of detailed knowledge and lack of suitable ordnance etc etc).

In fact, even when the aircraft being compared are fighting on the same side, it can be quite challenging to work out what was really going on; sometimes the manufacturer would "cheat" (e.g. Quill using a Spitfire XII in the race between Typhoon(?), Fw190A3 and Spitfire, making the political point that the Spitfire still had considerable development potential despite claims to the contrary from certain quarters perhaps not a million miles from Kingston). Sometimes you'd find that one pilot was better than the other. Sometimes you'd get a good example of aircraft x vs a bad example of aircraft y (the tolerances were pretty large even at the point of manufacture, and tended to grow in service as mods, wear and tear took their toll; or indeed as careful maintenance and clean-up work improved performance of certain special machines quite considerably - e.g. a few specialist high altitude Spitfires locally modified for extreme altitude performance to deter Ju86 overflights at FL400+).

So there's enough ambiguity for a thousand chart-wars.

IMO it is therefore much more sensible to attempt to match concrete aircraft performance data from original test data compiled for or by the intended end-user of the aeroplane, and to treat turn performance as an emergent behaviour.

If the other performance characteristics, which were defined and recorded in a considerably more satisfactory manner, are all matched, then it follows that the emergent turn performance is likely to be pretty accurate, because it's extremely unlikely that a good match across a number of known parameters (TAS vs altitude, stall speed, ROC vs altitude etc) would be dramatically wrong for unknown parameters (in other words, if I've got a car type, a colour, and a partial number plate, I am quite likely to have enough data to fill in the blanks because although there are lots of cars on the road, relatively few will pass through all of these "filters").

[deadmeat313]

Excellent post Viper2000!

However, we need to keep this debate going somehow, so errrr - I often find that my Hurricane barrel rolls much slower than I thought it would (based on a dream I had once with a Hurricane in it).

Fix pls Oleg!


T.

[Sven]

Well now that I think of it, in IL2 1946 4.10.1 spitfires also easily outturn hurricanes at any speed * ( As well as the newest M*d packs),
and that has been this way since the beginning as far as I remember (Forgotten Battles), not saying that that is what it should be, maybe time for revolution?

*Read for that underlined text: barely outturn it.